HomeRay Kurzweil VideosPBS Closer to Truth | The far future of humans and intelligence in the universe -- episodes with Ray Kurzweil

PBS Closer to Truth | The far future of humans and intelligence in the universe — episodes with Ray Kurzweil

March 5, 2011

Closer to Truth | Ray is a world-renowned inventor, computer scientist, innovative futurist and best-selling author. He founded four technology companies based on his revolutionary inventions in artificial intelligence, including reading machines for the blind, speech recognition, and music synthesis.

Ray was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition. He has successfully founded, developed, and sold four AI businesses in OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, and reading technology.

All of these technologies continue today as market leaders. He has been awarded numerous prizes, including MIT’s Inventor of the Year, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology (presented by President Clinton). Ray’s futurist books, data rich and toughly reasoned, are energized by a profound sense of what it really means when computing power continues growing at an exponentially rate. The picture he paints is a startling new world in the not-so-distant future. All his books have sparked great interest and some controversy: The Age of Intelligent Machines; The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence; and The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Following is from Ray’s foreword to The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos by James N. Gardner:

It is remarkable to me that almost all of the discussions of cosmology fail to mention the role of intelligence. In the common cosmological view, intelligence is just a bit of froth, something interesting that happens on the sidelines of the great cosmic story. But in the standard view, whether the universe winds up or down, ends up in fire (a great crunch and new Big Bang), or ice (an ever-expanding and ultimately dead universe), or something in-between, depends only on measures of dark matter, dark energy, and other parameters we have yet to discover. That the story of the universe is a story yet to be written by the intelligence it will spawn is almost never mentioned… So what will we do when our intelligence is in the range of a googol (10100) computations per second? One thing we may do is to engineer new universes. Similarly, our universe may be the creation of some superintelligences in another universe. In this case, there was an intelligent designer of our universe and that designer would be the evolved intelligence of some other universe that created ours. Perhaps our universe is a science fair experiment of a student in another universe.

The Drake formula provides a means to estimate the number of intelligent civilizations in a galaxy or in the universe. Essentially, the likelihood of a planet evolving biological life that has created sophisticated technology is tiny, but there are so many star systems, that there should still be many millions of such civilizations. Carl Sagan’s analysis of the Drake formula concludes that there should be around a million civilizations with advanced technology in our galaxy, while Frank Drake estimated around 10,000. And there are many billions of galaxies. Yet we don’t notice any of these intelligent civilizations, hence the paradox that Fermi described in his famous comment. As Jim Gardner and others have asked, where is everyone? We can readily explain why any one of these civilizations might be quiet. Perhaps it destroyed itself. Perhaps it is following the Star Trek ethical guideline to avoid interference with primitive civilizations (such as ours). These explanations make sense for any one civilization, but it is not credible, in my view, that every one of the billions of technology capable civilizations that should exist has destroyed itself or decided to remain quiet. The SETI project is sometimes described as trying to find a needle (evidence of a technical civilization) in a haystack (all the natural signals in the universe).

But actually, any technologically sophisticated civilization would be generating trillions of trillions of needles (noticeably intelligent signals). Even if they have switched away from electromagnetic transmissions as a primary form of communication, there would still be vast artifacts of electromagnetic phenomenon generated by all of the many computational and communication processes that such a civilization would need to engage in. Now let’s factor in the law of accelerating returns. The common wisdom (based on what I call the intuitive linear perspective) is that it would take many thousands, if not millions of years, for an early technological civilization to become capable of technology that spanned a solar system. But as I argued previously, because of the explosive nature of exponential growth, it will only take a quarter of a millennium (in our own case) to go from sending messages on horseback to saturating the matter and energy in our solar system with sublimely intelligent processes.

According to most analyses of the Drake equation, there should be billions of civilizations, and a substantial fraction of these should be ahead of us by millions of years. That’s enough time for many of them to be capable of vast galaxy-wide technologies. So how can it be that we haven’t noticed any of the trillions of trillions of “needles” that each of these billions of advanced civilizations should be creating? My own conclusion is that they don’t exist. If it seems unlikely that we would be in the lead in the universe, here on the third planet of a humble star in an otherwise undistinguished galaxy, it’s no more perplexing than the existence of our universe with its ever so precisely tuned formulas to allow life to evolve in the first place.

Comments (6)

I think the Drake equation is wrong in it’s prediction. fl = 1 (100% of these planets will develop life) -no.
We have one example of this, our planet.
How many times did this planet produce life from non-life?
Once in approx 5 billion years.
If this were 100% then new life would be emerging all the time continuously.
It is not.
Indeed we have not been able to even do it in a lab.
With a universe approx 15 billion years old the best this can be is around 35% not 100%.
It would have, in reality, have to happened over a period of 46 million years continuously to even reach 1%.

Isn’t it possible that intelligent civilizations have evolved but they didn’t last? Even ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years, is only a drop in the bucket in 14 billion years.

One thing that we can surely say about an intelligent civilization. They will have language. Languages that are in use are always changing… evolving. The new must be named. And the quirks of young, beautiful, and famous are copied… and passed on. Intelligent consciousness is passed on from generation to generation with language. That is why writing and printing and now computers and the www have had such an impact on technology.

Language is a meme… a megameme. Intelligent beings wherever they are will have to the same phenomena of processing, recording, remembering, words-for-things. These intelligent civilizations will have to have curiosity, and be creating new words for new perceptions, discoveries, and experiences.

Beings who live in technological civilizations will be like us… they will exist in a gigantic evolving sea of words.

As we all know we are living rather Accelerated times when Science and Technology is developing an ever accelerated pace and even the rate of acceleration is increasing too..

But still todays Humanity is still stuck up in Middle Age in terms of its Social Organization and Social System.. .We are currently living in a world where 1% of the world population own 40% of the worlds resources and almost 80% of the world population are living in poverty and more than half of which are living in day to day hunger.. Todays Monetary Based System which is Profit Oriented at ANY COST .. is jusit further debilitating this Social Stratification and Social Class gap widenings.. Poor are getting poorer.. rich are getting richer.. Corporotocracy has invaded Politicians via bribes and influences.. FED and all other Central Banks are being strictly controlled by Few Extremely Wealthy and Influential Families such as Rockerfeller and Rothschild.. JP Morgan.. They are funding every representatives election campaigns and every presidents election campaigns either openly or covertly.. and thus controlling the whole governments all around the world with their Miltary Industrial Complex and Bought out Mass Media.. and of course via their Privately Owned Federal Reserve Bank which relentlessly prints more money out of thin air and further enriching the rich via the increasing Interest rates.. especially in the third world countries.. Doesn’t it seem that one day general public would bo so angry that they would literally want to eradicate the whole rich and those gangsters who are manipulating all the atrocities going on in the world? It seems that if we do not Stop the Monetary System there is a greater possibility that desperate hungry, poor, young people would just do everything to blow up and fight with the “System” which favors the rich and gets rid of the unwanted “poors” and exploits them further for its own interest..

Solutions are offered by the Venus Project – http://www.thevenusproject.com and the Zeitgeist Movement..
Have you watched Zeitgeist Documentaries? http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com ?
I really would like to hear your opinion about these issues.. How can we solve all this? and waht should we do? And please watch Zeitgeist Documentaries and inform your thoughts..
Wait for your replies.